JASON GREGG – ARTIST STATEMENT
The American cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld once noted that, “Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons”. If so, then I was already an artist at age five, but it has taken me till now to believe that maybe, I am one.
As you look around you might notice that I follow no particular style, no artistic genre, just a collection of unrestrained outbursts of creativity. My art was never intended for anyone else, just private moments of unfettered imagination, influenced by the need to find a perfect retreat from my job as a psychologist who once specialised in emotional trauma.
My professional life was all about words, but my art became my happy place and like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, “I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”
In the past I have explored my skills as a photographer, even winning the Grand Champion prize at the last Roma Show, and several other national awards as well.
But always it’s been about my art, and the psychology of colour, the emotional effect of the images we choose to decorate our homes and workplaces.
Since those childhood years, I’ve used paints and pencils and even the occasional crayon, but it was when I discovered iPads, Apple pencils, drawing tablets and a magical Tassie-created app called Procreate that I really began to immerse myself in my art.
Art is so subjective, and like any artist, I’ve tried to choose pieces that might have commercial appeal. But with this exhibition, I also look to challenge the notion that fine art is more than just paints and pencils and that anyone, any age, with tools as simple as a smartphone and some free software can produce something of enduring artistic merit.
It just takes the desire and the time to find that artist who is in all of us.